Chess players in Myanmar protest the military coup and arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi by playing without their queens.
microRevolt projects investigate the dawn of sweatshops in early industrial capitalism to inform the current crisis of global expansion and the feminization of labor
Cory Doctorow on GMErgate and why shorts are actually good.
I think one reason the GameStop thing is fun is because it is apocalyptic in the sense that it reveals the hypocrisy and opt-in delusions of capitalism. I like this take:
"And the Redditors said, âWho cares? I donât care about your equations. I donât care about your valuation models. Iâm going to make the price go up because all it is to me is a number on the screen.â So they just stripped all the pretense out of Wall Street and used that to expose it and to screw it."
"So to sum it up, donât be a fucking idiot and bypass White Metal because you donât like what theyâre saying because guaran-damn-teed you will miss out on some critically great stuff due to blind ignorance andâŚfear."
Photographs of Loukanikos, "sausage", the legendary stray "riot dog" who was present at nearly every outbreak of mass class struggle and social disorder in Athens up until 2012, when he was adopted and retired outside the city. He died peacefully in his sleep in 2014, aged around 10.
RIP Loukanikos (~2004-2014)
Very fair overview of [American] individualist anarchism on a libertarian website.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
"There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
A review by Kristian Williams.
"Perhaps, then, Camusâ analogy may be borne out by reality: Perhaps the means of fighting pestilence will prove to be the same as those for fighting fascism."
Bakunin was right.
"To vote is to abdicate. To name one or several masters for a short or long period means renouncing oneâs own sovereignty. Whether he becomes absolute monarch, constitutional prince or a simple elected representative bearing a small portion of royalty, the candidate you raise to the throne or the chair will be your superior. You name men who are above laws, since they write them and their mission is to make you obey."
Another good one from Bob Black. "If youâre not revolting against work, youâre working against revolt."
Black originally wrote this in 1982. It could have been written today.
"the immiserating orderings of society have never been voted away, but that electoralismâfor all the plaintive promises that we can both rabble-rouse and ballot-boxâhas regularly served as a mechanism of capture for potentially transformative social movements."
Some history on the anarchist tradition of abstention candidates
"As to the anarchist position that universal suffrage did not legitimize authority, it is worth taking seriously. ... Even if we disagree that authority is never legitimate and Deweyâs self-aware public has been achieved, not all uses of authority â especially when it comes to state violence â can be justified by the vote. To do so would be to treat suffrage as a mythical unquestioned good rather than a reasonable choice."
The only consistent market anarchist position: dynamic price signals coupled with looting.
And really, the only way markets could ever even approximate their claims of efficient distribution in societies with poverty is if some people get things for free.
The 1A radio program on NPR gave anarchism a fair spot.
On the whole I thought several of the questions and answers were good, and it was nice that they got actual anarchist writers to go on. Though I think I disagree with William C.'s first answer. He implies that revulsion to anarchism is based on a misconception that mistakes the anarchist terrorists from a hundred years ago as the entirety of anarchism. But I don't think there is any level of peacefulness that would make anarchism palatable to those who can't see beyond their present society. If the Galleanists had never set off any bombs, Trump would still be seeking to demonize anarchism, because it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a someone who is rich to enter an anarchist society.
The New Testament includes several passages that warn against false teachers and express frustration that the earliest Christian communities are so easily taken in by lies. That this has been an ongoing problem since the beginning, for almost 2,000 years, makes me almost suspect that the people who are attracted to Christianity tend to be people who are attracted to any old nonsense that makes them feel like they have been given privileged knowledge.
This is an audio documentary series. I've listened to the first two episodes. It is well produced, and I understand Trump a tiny bit better now.